William Patry has an excellent post today called "Misuse via Cease & Desist Letters." It discusses the recent trend of lawyers asserting copyright in cease-and-desist letters in an effort to prevent posting of those letters on the Internet.

The Center for Social Media at American University has just released a study entitled The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy. The report, which is based on interviews with dozens of teachers and educators, concludes that:

Ars Technica reports that Creation Science Evangelism (CSE), a creationist group founded by Kent Hovind (who is currently in prison for violations of federal tax law), recently sent a raft of questionable DMCA takedown notices to YouTube complaining that various user-posted videos infringed its copyrights in videos of its seminars.

Among those users whose videos were taken down was the Rational Response Squad (RRS), a group of atheists dedicated to "fighting to free humanity from the mind disorder known as theism." Apparently, the videos flagged for removal were all critical of CSE, and some consisted of expression entirely original to the YouTube poster. Other videos used portions of CSE's own videos to make critical commentary about the organization. When its videos were removed, RRS unleashed a firestorm of criticism, threatening to sue CSE for abusing the DMCA's notice-and-takedown provisions and even contacting the prosecuting attorney in Hovind's tax case to inform her of CSE's conduct. Others have joined in the mix (here, here, and here). It appears that YouTube canceled RRS's entire account for a time (the rationale for doing so is not clear), but later reinstated it.